


Character Development

by tricatular



Category: True Detective
Genre: M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 00:01:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2830781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tricatular/pseuds/tricatular
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Marty has an epiphany.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Character Development

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yasaman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yasaman/gifts).



Life settled into a drowsy rhythm after Marty brought Rust home from the hospital. Any sharp edges and fractured bits of their partnership that still lingered after the erosion of time finally smoothed and healed after Carcosa, easing into a relationship that was more restful than Marty would have ever thought to expect from Rust, or from himself for that matter. Marty would have worried at the ease of it, but Rust’s tongue was as sharp as ever, and Marty still gave him just as much shit. It was just that the tension had bled out of both of them in Carcosa, like they had left more than blood and tears behind there.

So Marty puttered around the house while Rust plowed through books and recuperated and it was--nice. It was nice to have to fit his life around someone else again. Maybe Rust could live as an island, a man unto himself in the frozen north or in his shitty apartment behind the bar, but Marty wasn’t made for it. Rust seemed to do alright living with him though. They had lived together before of course, but that had been more for the case than anything else, and Marty had been uncomfortably aware the entire time that he had been living more with Crash than with Rust. Rust was a lot easier to live with than Rust-as-Crash.

After about a week though, they both started getting bored and antsy. PT and recovering from PT only took up so much time, and neither of them were up to doing any PI work right now. If this was retirement, Marty didn’t much like it. He said as much to Rust.

“Don’t you...golf and fish and shit? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when you retire?” asked Rust. 

Marty did indeed golf and fish and shit, but he figured it was best to head that tangent off at the pass before it descended into Rust making grim pronouncements on the rot of suburbia and the banality of putting balls in holes or what the fuck ever. 

“Can’t think my swing’s improved any after taking an ax to the chest. And I don’t actually have a boat, we stole that one we took Geraci out in, remember?”

Rust hmmed and returned to his book. Marty kept stewing over it for the next few days though, until Rust made to stagger his broken down ass to his truck, as if he was in any shape to drive. It took about ten minutes of badgering and arguing before Rust admitted to wanting to go to an art supply store. Marty didn’t know what the fuss was about, he knew Rust liked to sketch and that he didn’t have his omnipresent ledger with him at Marty’s place. It was all to the good in his mind if Rust wanted to fill a new one up with something other than gruesome crime scenes.

So Marty drove him down to the art supply store, and Rust picked out what he wanted, deliberating for what felt like hours before finally adding a few small canvases and some painting supplies to his haul. Marty felt something warm in him at the sight. And that night, it was what gave him his own idea. Marty wasn’t much of an artsy type, but his mind returned to the cover story he had used to get access to the records for the case: writing true crime. It had been a convenient and plausible lie, at the time, but turning it over in his head now, the thought had some appeal.

He looked into it the next day. Marty didn’t think he had anything close to the next Great American Novel in him, but his reports had always been readable enough, and he had liked writing in college. He googled around until he found a local writers group that met at the community college, and there was a creative writing course too. He signed up before he could second-guess himself.

It felt downright cozy, him tapping away at his laptop and Rust drawing in his taxman ledger. As the weeks stretched on, they both recovered and returned to work, Rust joining him in the PI business. Marty kept on at the book, dutifully attending his classes and writers group meetings. Marty had even finally ‘fessed up to Rust about what hobby he had taken up, which broke their mutual unspoken agreement to stay out of each other’s non-work related business.

“Thought you were penning love letters to your match.com beauties,” said Rust. 

“Think I’m done with dating for a while. No, I’ve been going to a creative writing class, and a writing group. It’s silly, I know--”

Rust looked at him keenly. “It’s not. Not if my drawing isn’t silly.” He paused, settling into that eerie, watchful stillness of his. “Show you mine if you show me yours.” 

Rust held out his book of drawings, and after a moment of hesitation, Marty handed over his laptop. Marty flipped through the drawings slowly: they were good, of course, he knew that after years of looking over Rust’s crime scene drawings, which had always been accurately rendered and full of detail. Now he let himself look at the drawings as art, and found that they had a curious power to them all their own. He could see Rust in those drawings, could see some of the way Rust looked at the world and the things that drew his eye. Most of the drawings were of the Louisiana landscape, sometimes disturbing, sometimes lovely. There were more than a few sketches of Marty, and those made him both pleased and uncomfortable.

He wondered what Rust was seeing in his words. He flipped through the drawings again as he waited nervously for Rust’s verdict.

“Well, you sure know how to spin a tale, Marty. Shoulda put your talents to better use than bar room bullshitting ages ago.”

“You think? Thanks, man. You should show some of your drawings to Audrey, see if you can’t get ‘em in a gallery somewhere. You’re a damn fine artist, Rust.” Rust grunted noncommittally in response.

This was a bit too much complimentary honesty for the both of them, and they lapsed into awkward silence. Rust handed the laptop back over to him, and Marty did the same with the sketchbook.

“You got the thing about the timing on the Fontenot case wrong though…” said Rust, and then they were off, comparing memories and arguing about the case, and suddenly, it was the new normal. Marty would write, and Rust would draw or paint, and then they’d spend the night bickering over Marty’s book. The days and nights passed easy, or as easy as things got when Rust was involved. And writing about the whole fucked up morass of the Childress case and Carcosa was its own sort of exorcism. He spent more than a few uneasy, nightmare-tossed nights, but they were like welcome purges of the foul shit that had festered in his psyche since he got off the force.

More and more, he found himself talking to his writing group about Rust and the book.

“Now, Rust says this bit is too short, but I don’t wanna go on about forensics…”

“My partner thinks I should cut this chapter, and I’m not sure…”

“Rust really liked this chapter, what did y’all think about…”

A few of the others in the group had their own regular readers, spouses or friends or old teachers, and the conversation in the group got more and more friendly as the weeks passed. When Lacey, a woman in her mid-thirties who was writing a frankly bizarre but strangely compelling romance novel of the sort Maggie used to read, invited everyone over to her place for a potluck dinner party, Marty found himself genuinely wanting to attend.

“Feel free to bring your plus ones along! And Marty, you bring that husband of yours by. You talk about him so much, we’re all dying to meet him!”

Lacey and the others spilled out of their meeting room before Marty could do anything but nod dumbfoundedly. His husband? They thought Rust was his husband? He frantically cast his mind back for everything he had said about Rust to them. He’d mostly called Rust his partner, which was the truth: they were business partners now, and they had been partners as detectives. He’d balked at calling Rust a roommate, like they were college kids sharing a dorm room. And while they were undoubtedly friends, that word still didn’t encompass all the other things they’d been to each other. So Marty had taken to calling Rust his partner, and he supposed that gay folks nowadays used it too, but he had figured the context would make it clear that he and Rust weren’t that sort of partner…

Except the context made it pretty damn clear that they were two men sharing just about every part of their lives together. It had been months, and Rust had shown no inclination to move out. Marty had no inclination to kick him out either. They were working well together, and they were getting along tolerably well too. As it stood, their arrangement was not unlike marriage, just without kids or sex. Kids were off the table at this stage of the game, but sex...Marty wouldn’t say no to that. Rust was a looker, even after years of hard living. And hell, it wasn’t like Marty had had the best luck with women, and he was too damn old to work up much of a panic over his Kinsey number being something other than zero. Marty was starting to think that maybe he should look for a box with a really nice ribbon.

He stewed over it for a couple of days, distracted enough that Rust noticed and said something about it over dinner. 

“What’s crawled up your ass and died?”

“Lacey from my writing group invited me to a dinner party.”

Rust’s silence in response was eloquent, or maybe Marty was projecting. Either way, the silence said a lot of things like, “what the fuck,” and “dinner party? this is one of those bourgeois, empty social nicety things you’re good at Marty, what the fuck,” and “there better be more to this than you agonizing over what the fuck to take to a potluck.”

“Lacey said I should bring my husband with me.”

“I am not inclined to entertain a bafflingly late in life sexual crisis right now, Marty.” Rust paused, clearly wondering if he should pursue this line of inquiry. “Why the hell would she think you have a husband?”

Marty fiddled with the remains of his meal. “I maybe talk about you a lot. And call you my partner.”

“Okay, so she made a not unreasonable mistake and you set her straight. What’s the fuss? Go find some woman to bang if your masculinity’s that threatened.” Rust had the same supremely uninterested and annoyed look on his face that he always did when Marty tried to unload on him about his relationship issues.

“I didn’t--well, I didn’t get a chance to say anything.”

Rust stared at him. “Okay. So say something next time you see everyone then.” Rust got up from the table to take his plate over to the sink. The lean line of his back was tense. Fuck, Marty was fucking this up.

“The thing is--we kind of are married.” Rust turned slowly to stare at him.

Marty didn’t let that deter him. “I mean, we’re sharing a house, we’re sharing a business, we spend all our time together. We’ve basically done everything but fuck, Rust.”

“Do you want me to leave?” There was a mean sort of amusement in Rust’s eyes, but his face was carefully blank, his voice toneless. 

“No! I’m not doing this right--” Marty surged up to meet Rust where he was still standing by the sink, grabbed him by the shirt, and pulled him in for a kiss. Rust’s hands came up to Marty’s wrists as if he was going to break Marty’s hold, but he simply held on as Marty coaxed Rust’s lips into opening. Rust kept the pace slow and lingering. Marty had never kissed a man before, but it wasn’t so different. And it was Rust, who had always drawn Marty even as he repelled him, who he knew better than anyone by now. It felt right. Marty had to admit, it was a more passionate kiss than he had managed in years of half-hearted online dating.

When they broke apart breathing hard, Rust let go of Marty’s wrists and leaned back provocatively against the counter, smirking. 

“You call that a proposal?”

“Yeah, well, I’ll get you a box with a nicer ribbon later.”

Rust huffed out a laugh and pushed him towards the bedroom. 

A couple of days later, they both went to Lacey’s dinner. Marty introduced Rust, and neither of them corrected anybody when they called Rust his husband.


End file.
